17-year-old Texas teen to be first American to graduate from Bolshoi Ballet Academy

Joy Womack, a 17-year-old ballet dancer from Austin, is set to become the first American to graduate from the Bolshoi Ballet Academy in Russia. She will take her finals and graduate in May, according to the Daily Mail.

Womack has been studying at the Bolshoi Ballet Academy, recognized as the best in the world, since 2009. She started her dance career at the age of three, first in California, before moving to Austin in 2006 where she studied at the Austin School of Classical Ballet. She has also attended the Kirov Academy of Ballet, the Los Angeles Ballet School and the Yuri Grigoriev School of Ballet, according to her website.

Since moving to Russia she has faced many hardships including leaving her parents and her eight brothers and sisters.

“I begged my parents to let me go,” she told the New York Times in 2010. “I had never been to a foreign country.”

At the academy she eats, sleeps and breathes ballet, dancing for 10 hours a day, six days a week. She has faced not only leaving her family, but also the suspicion of other students and demanding teachers all while learning a foreign language. Injury and financial hardships have threatened to end her time at the school, but she says it’s the only place she fits in.

You can see a glimpse of her life in Russia in this New York Times segment here: